September 2012

September 28, 2012

A fascinating article on the BBC website today looked at British English words and expressions creeping into American English - like spot on, chat up, sell-by date, gastropub, twee and chattering classes. Another example is ginger, meaning red-haired, which became more popular in American English after the publication of the Harry Potter books.

Sometimes British English terms have taken off because they seem to fill a gap in American English, according to the American editor of the OED, like one-off and go missing. Sometimes Americans use the British term - university instead of school or college, for instance - when they are outside the US and want people to be clear about what they mean.

It's not just British words that are becoming more popular in the US. Professor Ben Yagoda of the University of Delaware has noticed his students using the glottal stop instead of a T, a feature of the London accent. He has also noticed a trend towards adopting the British way of writing dates - day/month/year, rather than writing the month first.

The article is well worth reading, regardless of the variety of English you speak. Thanks to Helen and Elizabeth for sending me the link.

September 27, 2012

Prime minister David Cameron could not answer the question posed by US chat-show host David Letterman about the literal meaning of Magna Carta. He's not alone; according to a 2008 Daily Telegraph article cited on the Magna Carta Wikipedia page, 45% of the British population do not even know what Magna Carta is.

Magna Carta (or The Magna Carta -- there is usually no definite article when the term is used in academic documents) was a document, originally written in Latin, signed by King John at Runnymede in June 1215 under pressure from feudal barons. It guaranteed certain liberties for the population (the noble part, anyway) and limited the arbitrary power of the monarch.

Magna Carta is Latin for great charter. Magna is the feminine form of the Latin adjective magnus, big or great, and Carta is from charta, meaning document or charter. It is occasionally referred to by its English translation, the Great Charter, in historical documents. The spelling Magna Charta was common up till the 19th century, according to the OED.

September 26, 2012

Today is the European Day of Languages, which is organised by the European Commission and the Council of Europe, and which celebrates Europe's language diversity and encourages people to learn more languages. The European Union has 23 official languages (there will be 24 next year when Croatia joins), around 60 regional and minority languages, and over 175 migrant languages.

Various events take place across Europe each year on 26th September encouraging people with different mother tongues to talk to each other. Today there's a 'speak-dating' session in Prague, a 'linguistic bath' in Berlin and an international poetry evening in Cardiff, among other events.

September 25, 2012

Zhou Youguang is 106 years old and became active in Chinese politics only in his late 80s, according to an International Herald Tribunearticle published earlier this year (and sent to me by a friend - thanks, Elizabeth). He is perhaps best known, and most celebrated within China, for inventing the Pinyin system, which is a Romanised spelling system for Chinese characters. Pinyin literally means 'to piece together sounds'.

Children in Britain may learn to read and write using the phonics method, where the sounds of words are pronounced individually -- C-A-T (Kuh-Ah-Tuh), for instance. However, this system doesn't work for a language without an alphabet, like Chinese, and Zhou was entrusted with the task of inventing a phonetic alphabet in order to help more Chinese people become literate. It did have a huge effect on literacy in the country. The article mentioned above says that nowadays all Chinese pupils begin with Pinyin before moving on to characters.

Creating the Pinyin system was a mammoth job, the first task of which was to decide whether to use an existing alphabet, such as a Cyrillic, Japanese or Roman alphabet, or whether to invent a new Chinese alphabet. Zhou felt that using a Roman alphabet would help China connect better with the rest of the world.

Zhou had an interesting, if difficult at times, life, working in a Wall Street bank (he was an economist by profession with an interest in linguistics), having several discussions with Albert Einstein and being in and out of favour with various Chinese governments, with the result that he was banished to a rural wilderness for two years to undergo 're-education'. Here's the full article.

September 22, 2012

Tory Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell has denied insulting police officers by calling them 'plebs' and the BBC website has a piece today on the origin and meaning of this word.

First reported in the late 18th century, the word pleb is short for plebeian, originally an ordinary common person in ancient Rome, as opposed to the more privileged patricians or nobles (although the plebeians were higher in status than the Roman proletariat). The education at 19th-century English public schools was based on the classics, and the OED tells us that 'pleb' became Westminster School slang for a tradesman's son.

Not everyone objected to being called a pleb - the Plebs' League was a Marxist organisation founded in Oxford in the early 20th century, and these days people might refer to themselves as a pleb, referring to their reading habits, or tastes in food, for instance. However, calling someone else a pleb is another matter.

More on the word pleb and its classical references in today's BBC article.

September 20, 2012

David Crystal was on Radio 4's Today programme a couple of days ago (listen here for a few more days) talking about English spelling and his new book Spell It Out.

Professor Crystal said that the problem with English spelling has a lot to do with it being 'messed up' in previous centuries - indeed, Old English spelling was quite straightforward and related to pronunciation. The silent B (as in debt) is a good example of how things were messed up. In Middle English (approximately 12th-15th centuries) debt was written det, dett, or dette, but spelling reformers of the 16th century thought that these different spellings were very confusing and introduced the b 'to make things easier for people' - the thinking was that in those days literate people knew Latin and in Latin the word for debt was debitus, with a b.

The Norman French were another group of people who 'messed things up'. They didn't like the consonant cluster cw (as in cwen, Old English spelling of 'woman') as it looked unfamiliar to them, since those two consonants don't appear together in French. They therefore changed the spelling to queen.

Professor Crystal said he believed that people should spell properly and follow the rules, but he noted that already there is a certain amount of leeway in English spellings - about 15% of words in the dictionary have alternative spellings, and the internet is leading a trend towards simplified spellings. He said that in fifty years' time spellings will be very different to those today.

September 17, 2012

A student asked me about the word 'uncanny', so I checked it up in the OED, and also looked up canny. Uncanny is the earlier of the two words according to the OED - it says of canny, "a comparatively modern word". The word canny is very much associated with Scotland today - as the OED says, "it has developed an extensive series of meanings, two or three of which are in common use in English literature to denote qualities considered characteristically Scottish". The word comes from the old Scottish noun can meaning 'skill' or 'knowledge', so a canny person is knowing, prudent or shrewd. A canny wife in the 18th and 19th centuries was a midwife (cf French femme sage), and the canny moment was the moment of childbirth.

The modern meaning of uncanny is weird or spooky, and it is not particularly Scottish. This meaning, according to the OED, became common around 1850. The word was originally Scottish or northern English and had various meanings, including mischievous, careless, unreliable and unsafe.

A word related to canny is the Scottish ca'canny, which is an abbreviation of call canny and means 'caution' or 'the practice of going slow at work'. It's a verb as well as a noun; to ca'canny means to drive (a horse) gently and carefully.

September 15, 2012

I watched the first episode of Hilary Devey's Women at the Top on iPlayer earlier (available here for another week or so), in which Hilary tried to get to the bottom of why there are so few women in top management positions.

A (male) recruitment consultant highlighted the gender bias in job advertisements. He said that phrases such as 'exceptional individual' and 'must have gravitas' in an ad deter women from applying, as women tend not to describe themselves as 'exceptional'. He also said that if you ask ordinary people what sort of word 'gravitas' is, some people will say it is a neutral word, some people will say it is a masculine word, but nobody ever says it is a feminine word.

The programme included an experiment where the same job - that of chief financial officer - was advertised in two different ads, which used a different style of language. One ad used 'tough' language, and included phrases such as 'a demanding job', 'relentless focus' and 'outstanding leader', while the other used 'softer' language, such as 'engage with people at all levels' and 'make a significant contribution'. The second advertisement appealed more to three women all currently on the books of a recruitment agency.

The recruitment consultant said that not only are women put off applying for senior positions because of the language used in the ads, but should they apply and get as far as being invited for interview, they will probably be interviewed by selectors who have a stereotypical picture in their mind of a person 'with gravitas' or someone with 'relentless focus', and it's probably a man. The women, therefore, will probably be overlooked at the interview.

September 09, 2012

Ed Miliband introduced the new word 'predistribution' to UK political debate last week. The word was coined by Yale professor Jacob Hacker a year or so ago. It is an alternative to the policy of 'redistribution' which relies on taxes and benefits to distribute money from the well-off to the less well-off. Predistribution is meant to tackle the problem of inequality earlier in the process, by making sure that people earn a decent living wage and thus do not need to rely on tax credits or benefits, as now.

Interpretations of the word 'predistribution' differ, but Labour politicians are highlighting the need for a higher skilled workforce which will earn higher wages to begin with, and thus will not reach the stage of requiring state handouts.

There was a piece on Radio 4's Today programme yesterday on the policy and word (listen for another week here) or, if you prefer to read something, thisTelegraph article goes into a fairly detailed explanation.

There is a growing trend for the coining of words beginning with the prefix pre-. See this old post of mine, and also this one on 'pre-loved', and this one on 'pre-overdue'.

September 02, 2012

Chambers sent me an inspection copy of their new Thesaurus last week, and I have spent many enjoyable hours browsing it. I’m not just saying that .... I often reference Chambers Dictionary in this blog (for instance, here and here), and use it a lot myself. It’s not the only dictionary I use – there is no one single dictionary which could be called perfect; they all have their advantages, disadvantages and quirks (and Chambers has more quirks than most, but those are part of its charm).

The same goes for thesauruses – they all have their own style and their own strengths. If I need a synonym of a word I will definitely use the Chambers Thesaurus, but I will also look in my New Oxford Thesaurus of English too (even though it’s not that new now) and Roget. I’ll use all three (and occasionally online thesaurus sites) as they are all different.

Just like its sister dictionary, the Chambers Thesaurus packs in lots of words. It is arranged alphabetically, making it easy to refer to (Roget’s Thesaurus, on the other hand, isn’t alphabetical, words are grouped by theme). Unlike its Oxford counterpart the Chambers Thesaurus doesn’t give example sentences, which means there is lots more space available for words. So, there are headwords in Chambers that don’t appear at all in my Oxford Thesaurus – mealy-mouthed and mind-boggling for two. Jammy is in Oxford but the reader is merely referred to the Lucky entry; in Chambers there are 13 synonyms for Jammy given - and they’re not the same as those listed at Lucky.

Oxford and Chambers give different synonyms for the same word – this is why I always use a range of thesauruses when writing something – so, for example, at the Meadow entry, Chambers has saeter, leasow, haugh and inch, which do not appear in Oxford, and Oxford has bawn, which does not appear in Chambers.

The Chambers Thesaurus, just like the Dictionary, contains a number of Scottish words. It also contains Shakespearean, Spenserian and other obsolete and archaic words, which the Oxford Thesaurus doesn’t. So, at Thunder we have intonate, upthunder and foulder, at Lord (verb) there’s overoffice and at Stupid there’s clay-brained, fatbrained and sodden-witted, as well as the Welsh twp (not archaic).

Most people aren’t ever going to use such archaic words in their essays, articles, blogs, or whatever, but one of the attractions of the Chambers Thesaurus is that it is just a great book to browse (as is Chambers Dictionary with its humorous definitions, see here). One of the features of the new edition of Chambers Thesaurus is a 52-page section entitled The Word Lover’s Gallimaufry (the definition of Gallimaufry in Chambers Dictionary is ‘an inconsistent or absurd medley, a miscellaneous gathering’). Here there are lists of words on all sorts of topics, eg 14 words to sound like an armchair general (including exit strategy, optics, and hybrid threat), 21 words to understand Blinglish (including brethren, innit, and nang), 41 words to sound like an estate agent (including deceptively spacious and fixer-upper), 18 words to understand female culture (including girl geek and guyatus), 34 words to understand male culture (yes – almost double the number! – they include man flu, himbo and moobs), 15 words to sound more elegant (including greensward and nepenthe), 34 words to understand social networking (including oversharing, sofalizing and social notworking) and very many more. No doubt they will be appearing in Virtual Linguist blog posts before long.